Monthly Archives: September 2014

Research suggests that family violence is two to four times higher in the law-enforcement community than in the general population. So where’s the public outrage?

Should the National Football League suspend or ban any player caught assaulting a wife or girlfriend? That seems to be the conventional wisdom since video emerged of running back Ray Rice knocking his wife unconscious in an elevator, even as reports surface that many more NFL players have domestic-abuse records.

While I have no particular objection to a suspension of any length for such players, the public focus on NFL policy seems strange and misplaced to me. Despite my general preference for reducing the prison population, an extremely strong person rendering a much smaller, weaker person unconscious with his fists, as Rice did, is a situation where prison is particularly appropriate. More generally, clear evidence of domestic abuse is something that ought to result in legal sanction. Employers aren’t a good stand in for prosecutors, juries, and judges.

Should ex-convicts who abused their partners be denied employment forever? I think not. Our notion should be that they’ve paid their debt to society in prison. Pressure on the NFL to take a harder line against domestic abuse comes in the context of a society where the crime isn’t adequately punished, so I totally understand it. Observing anti-NFL rhetoric, you’d nevertheless get the impression that other employers monitor and sanction domestic abuse incidents by employees. While I have nothing against pressuring the NFL to go beyond what the typical employer does, I fear that vilifying the league has the effect of misleading the public into a belief that it is out of step with general norms on this issue. Domestic violence is less common among NFL players than the general population.

And there is another American profession that has a significantly more alarming problem with domestic abuse. I’d urge everyone who believes in zero tolerance for NFL employees caught beating their wives or girlfriends to direct as much attention—or ideally, even more attention—at police officers who assault their partners. Several studies have found that the romantic partners of police officers suffer domestic abuse at rates significantly higher than the general population. And while all partner abuse is unacceptable, it is especially problematic when domestic abusers are literally the people that battered and abused women are supposed to call for help.

If there’s any job that domestic abuse should disqualify a person from holding, isn’t it the one job that gives you a lethal weapon, trains you to stalk people without their noticing, and relies on your judgment and discretion to protect the abused against domestic abusers?

The opprobrium heaped on the NFL for failing to suspend or terminate domestic abusers, and the virtual absence of similar pressure directed at police departments, leads me to believe that many people don’t know the extent of domestic abuse among officers. This is somewhat surprising, since a country shocked by Ray Rice’s actions ought to be even more horrified by the most egregious examples of domestic abuse among police officers. Their stories end in death.

There’s the recently retired 30-year veteran police officer who shot his wife and then himself in Colorado Springs earlier this summer. There’s Tacoma Police Chief David Brame, who perpetrated another murder-suicide in April. (Update: it’s in fact the tenth anniversary of this crime, which I missed in the ABC story.) Also in April, an Indiana news station reported on “Sgt. Ryan Anders, a narcotics officer,” who “broke into his ex-wife’s home and fatally shot her. He then turned the gun on himself.” In February, “Dallas police confirmed … that a Crandall police officer shot and killed his wife before killing himself.” Last year, a Nevada police officer killed his wife, his son, and then himself. And Joshua Boren, a Utah police officer, “killed his wife, their two children, his mother-in-law and then himself” after receiving “text messages … hours earlier threatening to leave him and take their kids and confronting him for raping her.” That isn’t an exhaustive survey, just a quick roundup of recent stories gleaned from the first couple pages of Google results. And statistics about “blue” domestic abuse are shocking in their own way.

As the National Center for Women and Policing noted in a heavily footnoted information sheet, “Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population. A third study of older and more experienced officers found a rate of 24 percent, indicating that domestic violence is two to four times more common among police families than American families in general.” Cops “typically handle cases of police family violence informally, often without an official report, investigation, or even check of the victim’s safety,” the summary continues. “This ‘informal’ method is often in direct contradiction to legislative mandates and departmental policies regarding the appropriate response to domestic violence crimes.” Finally, “even officers who are found guilty of domestic violence are unlikely to be fired, arrested, or referred for prosecution.”

What struck me as I read through the information sheet’s footnotes is how many of the relevant studies were conducted in the 1990s or even before. Research is so scant and inadequate that a precise accounting of the problem’s scope is impossible, as The New York Times concluded in a 2013 investigation that was nevertheless alarming. “In many departments, an officer will automatically be fired for a positive marijuana test, but can stay on the job after abusing or battering a spouse,” the newspaper reported. Then it tried to settle on some hard numbers:

In some instances, researchers have resorted to asking officers to confess how often they had committed abuse. One such study, published in 2000, said one in 10 officers at seven police agencies admitted that they had “slapped, punched or otherwise injured” a spouse or domestic partner. A broader view emerges in Florida, which has one of the nation’s most robust open records laws. An analysis by The Times of more than 29,000 credible complaints of misconduct against police and corrections officers there strongly suggests that domestic abuse had been underreported to the state for years.

After reporting requirements were tightened in 2007, requiring fingerprints of arrested officers to be automatically reported to the agency that licenses them, the number of domestic abuse cases more than doubled—from 293 in the previous five years to 775 over the next five. The analysis also found that complaints of domestic violence lead to job loss less often than most other accusations of misconduct.
A chart that followed crystallized the lax punishments meted out to domestic abusers. Said the text, “Cases reported to the state are the most serious ones—usually resulting in arrests. Even so, nearly 30 percent of the officers accused of domestic violence were still working in the same agency a year later, compared with 1 percent of those who failed drug tests and 7 percent of those accused of theft.”

The visualization conveys how likely it is that domestic abuse by police officers is underreported in states without mandatory reporting requirements–and also the degree to which domestic abuse is taken less seriously than other officer misconduct:

It would be wonderful if domestic violence by police officers was tracked in a way that permitted me to link something more comprehensive and precise than the National Center for Women and Policing fact sheet, the studies on which it is based, the New York Times analysis, or other press reports from particular police departments. But the law enforcement community hasn’t seen fit to track these cases consistently or rigorously. Says the International Association of Chiefs of Police in a 2003 white paper on the subject, “the rate of domestic violence is estimated to be at least as common as that of the general population and limited research to date indicates the possibility of higher incidence of domestic violence among law enforcement professionals.” Their position on the evidence: “The problem exists at some serious level and deserves careful attention regardless of estimated occurrences.”

An academic study highlighted by Police Chief Magazine relied on newspaper reports for its universe of 324 cases of officer involved domestic violence, or OIDV in their report.

Here’s what they found:

The cases involved the arrest of 281 officers employed by 226 police agencies. Most of the cases involved a male officer (96 percent) employed in a patrol or other street-level function (86.7 percent). There were 43 supervisory officers arrested for an OIDV-related offense. One-third of the OIDV victims were the current spouse of the arrested officer. Close to one-fourth of the victims were children, including a child or a stepchild of the officer or children who were unrelated to the arrested officer. There were 16 victims who also were police officers. Simple assault was the most serious offense charged in roughly 40 percent of the cases, followed by aggravated assault (20.1 percent), forcible rape (9.9 percent), intimidation (7.1 percent), murder/non-negligent manslaughter (4.6 percent), and forcible fondling (3.7 percent).

Data on final organizational outcomes were available for 233 of the cases. About one-third of those cases involved officers who were separated from their jobs either through resignation or termination. The majority of cases in which the final employment outcome was known resulted in a suspension without job separation (n = 152). Of those cases where there was a conviction on at least one offense charged, officers are known to have lost their jobs through either termination or resignation in less than half of those cases (n = 52). More than one-fifth of the OIDV cases involved an officer who had also been named individually as a party defendant in at least one federal court civil action for depravation of civil rights under color of law pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §1983 at some point during their law enforcement careers.
Think about that. Domestic abuse is underreported. Police officers are given the benefit of the doubt by colleagues in borderline cases. Yet even among police officers who were charged, arrested, and convicted of abuse, more than half kept their jobs.

In the absence of comprehensive stats, specific incidents can provide at least some additional insights. Take Southern California, where I keep up with the local news. Recent stories hint at an ongoing problem. Take the 18-year LAPD veteran arrested “on suspicion of domestic violence and illegal discharging of a firearm,” and the officer “who allegedly choked his estranged wife until she passed out” and was later charged with attempted murder. There’s also the lawsuit alleging that the LAPD “attempted to bury a case of sexual assault involving two of its officers, even telling the victim not to seek legal counsel after she came forward.”

The context for these incidents is a police department with a long history of police officers who beat their partners. Los Angeles Magazine covered the story in 1997. A whistleblower went to jail in 2003 when he leaked personnel files showing the scope of abuse in the department. “Kids were being beaten. Women were being beaten and raped. Their organs were ruptured. Bones were broken,” he told L.A. Weekly. “It was hard cold-fisted brutality by police officers, and nothing was being done to protect their family members. And I couldn’t stand by and do nothing.”

Subsequently, Ms. Magazine reported, a “review of 227 domestic violence cases involving LAPD officers confirmed that these cases were being severely mishandled, according to the LAPD Inspector-General. In more than 75 percent of confirmed cases, the personnel file omitted or downplayed the domestic abuse. Of those accused of domestic violence, 29 percent were later promoted and 30 percent were repeat offenders. The review and the revelation led to significant reforms in the LAPD’s handling on police officer-involved domestic violence.”

Will these incidents galvanize long overdue action if they’re all assembled in one place? Perhaps fence-sitters will be persuaded by a case in which a police officer abused his daughter by sitting on her, pummeling her, and zip-tying her hands and forcing her to eat hot sauce derived from ghost chili peppers. Here’s what happened when that police officer’s ex-girlfriend sent video evidence of the abuse to his boss:

There have been plenty of other reports published this year of police officers perpetrating domestic abuse, and then there’s another horrifying, perhaps related phenomenon: multiple allegations this year of police officers responding to domestic-violence emergency calls and raping the victim. Here’s the Detroit Free Press in March:

The woman called 911, seeking help from police after reportedly being assaulted by her boyfriend. But while police responded to the domestic violence call, one of the officers allegedly took the woman into an upstairs bedroom and sexually assaulted her, authorities said.
Here is a case that The San Jose Mercury News reported the same month:

Officer Geoffrey Graves, 38, who has been with the Police Department for six years, was charged by Santa Clara County prosecutors with forcible rape in connection with a Sept. 22 incident. The incident began when Graves and three other San Jose officers responded to a family disturbance involving a married couple about 2 a.m., prosecutors said. The officers determined that both spouses had been drinking and had argued, but that no crime had occurred, authorities said.

The woman, who works as a hotel maid, told officers that she wanted to spend the night at a hotel where she had previously worked. About 2:30 a.m., Graves drove the woman to the hotel, where she went to her room alone and fell asleep, authorities said. Fifteen minutes later, the woman heard knocking and opened the door.
Then he allegedly raped her.

There is no more damaging perpetrator of domestic violence than a police officer, who harms his partner as profoundly as any abuser, and is then particularly ill-suited to helping victims of abuse in a culture where they are often afraid of coming forward. The evidence of a domestic-abuse problem in police departments around the United States is overwhelming. The situation is significantly bigger than what the NFL faces, orders of magnitude more damaging to society, and yet far less known to the public, which hasn’t demanded changes. What do police in your city or town do when a colleague is caught abusing their partner? That’s a question citizens everywhere should investigate.

Like this:

Even though many couples are choosing to marry later in life, our laws haven’t been updated to address dating partner abuse

Some said it would be too hard – impossible, even.

Two decades ago, a broad and brave coalition of determined women’s advocates, domestic violence survivors and fair-minded leaders in Congress set out to do what some said could not be done: pass a law that helped protect women and their families from the scourge of domestic violence.

The proposal, called the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), took badly needed steps toward protecting women. It gave judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement officials new tools to combat violence; it strengthened services for survivors and their families; and, for the first time under federal law, ensured that dangerous individuals subject to domestic violence restraining orders couldn’t have easy access to guns.

Still, securing the needed support for the law was no easy fight. There was obstruction, willful misrepresentation, and needless gridlock. Entrenched special interests sprang into action; inaction was their goal.

But Americans made their voices heard, and Congress passed VAWA with the votes of Democrats and Republicans alike. And so, 20 years ago this weekend, then-President Bill Clinton made the Violence Against Women Act the law of the land – a real victory of common sense and courage over the status quo.

Since its passage, VAWA has been a staggering success in making our communities safer. Annual rates of domestic violence have dropped by more than half. The law has saved lives and kept guns out of the hands of countless domestic abusers.

But 20 years later, there is still more work to do to make women safer from gun violence.

Because of VAWA and subsequent updates to the law, individuals who are under domestic violence protection orders or have misdemeanor domestic violence convictions can’t legally buy or own guns. But even though many couples are choosing to marry later in life, our laws haven’t been updated to address dating partner abuse. And convicted stalkers can still get guns.With such glaring loopholes in our gun laws, guns sometimes fall into the wrong hands – and the results for women are often tragic.

Most of the time, women are murdered with guns by someone they know, either by a family member or an intimate partner, like a former or current husband or boyfriend. In domestic abuse situations, if the abuser has access to a gun, it increases the chance that a woman will die by 500 percent.

This is one reason why American women are 11 times more likely to be shot to death than their peers in other countries, and why more American women were killed by gunfire by a partner between 2001 and 2012 than the total number of American troops killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.

That is not the America we strive for, is it?

That’s why it’s time for Congress to build on the legacy and success of the Violence Against Women Act by closing the loopholes that let dangerous stalkers and abusive dating partners buy guns.

There are several commonsense proposals before Congress right now that would help address the nexus of gun crime and domestic violence – and they would do nothing to limit the rights of responsible, law-abiding gun owners.

In fact, for those of us who own guns and cherish our Second Amendment rights, these laws should be a welcome step. Because every time guns fall into the wrong hands and are used to intimidate, injure, or murder women, it erodes the rights of responsible gun owners everywhere.

Passing these laws wouldn’t prevent every act of gun violence against women, but there is no doubt they would save women’s lives. They are the commonsense thing to do.

Over the last two decades, the Violence Against Women Act has been reauthorized, improved, and updated several times. Sometimes, a small minority of legislators and powerful special interests – standing on the wrong side of history and far out of step with the vast majority of Americans – has fought it.

But each time, Democrats and Republicans have voted for commonsense and safety. And thankfully, each time they have prevailed.

With lots of hard work, and with reasonable Americans making their voices heard, I hope that a similar bipartisan group of leaders can forge the hard but necessary path of making America’s women safer from gun violence.

It won’t be easy. But it will save lives.

Former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is the Co-Founder of Americans for Responsible Solutions.

Kim Gandy was sitting in her Washington, D.C., office a few days after NFL commissioner Roger Goodell announced a two-game suspension for Ray Rice. Like a lot of people in her line of work, the president of the National Network to End Domestic Violence had been very critical of the NFL’s entire response to Rice’s arrest for aggravated assault after he allegedly knocked out his then-girlfriend/now-wife in an elevator.

The phone rang.

“Is this Kim Gandy?”

“Yes.”

“This is Roger Goodell.”

Gandy was stunned. The two went on to have an hourlong conversation. Goodell asked a lot of questions. What is domestic violence? How can you tell who is likely to abuse their partner? What would a good workplace policy for all NFL employees look like?

Gandy said Goodell was surprised at the storm of criticism after the Rice suspension and fine and told her: “Here’s what I don’t understand — we actually did something. Half a million is a lot of money. Why aren’t people mad at the judge and prosecutor who did nothing at all?”

“Victims and survivors and advocates aren’t looking at the money,'” she told Goodell. “The judge and prosecutor don’t have fans to be mad at them, not in the way fans have expectations of you.”

These conversations were the beginning of a bold new policy on domestic violence and sexual assault that the NFL unveiled last Thursday in a letter to team owners. Goodell surveyed experts in the field — Gandy is a former prosecutor in New Orleans — and built a framework that included a six-game suspension for first offenses and a lifetime ban with the second, though players have the opportunity to apply for reinstatement after a year.

The NFL also instituted a workplace policy for all the men and women it employs — not just players — and is working to create an outreach element with the ultimate aim of changing the conversation about the issue.

“He did a lot of listening and, I think, was genuinely trying to understand,” Gandy said. “I know he was talking to a lot of other people, maybe to see if we would all say the same thing.”

On Aug. 21, the NFL held a meeting at its Park Avenue offices. The league brought in Gandy and a handful of other experts and activists to help hone the policy it outlined. Among those invited: Esta Soler from Futures without Violence, Tony Porter from a Call to Men, Joe Ehrmann from Coach for America and activist Rita Smith. They met with Goodell, executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent and other NFL higher-ups. The meeting was slated for two hours but went longer, and Goodell stayed until the last conversation wrapped up.

“The policy wasn’t where we wanted, and that’s my responsibility,” Goodell told reporters on Wednesday at a flag football event. “I think it is important for the ownership to understand that and how serious we’re taking this issue and the importance of the work that needs to be done. It’s not just about discipline. We’re going to step up every aspect of our program with education and training. We’ve been working an awful lot over the years with experts in this field, and we think we really can make a difference here. I wanted them to hear that directly from me.”

Across the board, people who work around the issue of domestic violence were pleased with the change in tone.

“I get a sense from him that there’s no pulling back,” said Porter, co-founder of A Call to Men. “He’s in this for the long haul.”

Porter has worked with the NFL for a decade, speaking about issues related to violence and the way men and women interact. He said he gets the sense that the NFL will put money behind the parts of the program that include outreach to colleges and high schools to speak about sexual violence and control issues.

Think of all the players who have camps each year, Porter said, and the value of those players taking the message forward. “They have hundreds of boys hanging on their every word,” he said.

Adds Soler, the president of Futures Without Violence: “Their opportunity to actually change the norm is so great. “The outline is powerful, but now the work needs to happen.”

Porter also understands how the NFL got it wrong in the first place.

“I think the NFL for the most part is like any other organizational structure,” Porter said. “If you look at the domestic violence response around our nation, it’s not a good response.”

Gandy said that part of the issue for the NFL is that different parts of the country may have very different legal processes. She pointed to this story about an Arkansas woman who was murdered. Before her death, Laura Aceves pleaded with law enforcement to do something about her alleged abuser, who had been repeatedly arrested and released.

The NFL has had its own tragic cases. Former Chiefs player Jovan Belcher murdered Kasandra Perkins before taking his own life in 2013. Panthers receiver Rae Carruth was found guilty in 2001 of conspiring to kill Cherica Adams, who was carrying his child.

The NFL will investigate each alleged case of domestic violence independently — a process happening right now after 49ers defensive tackle Ray McDonald was arrested over Labor Day weekend. The league said it will wait to see if someone is charged before issuing any decision.

“Yes, I think that was very clear in the policy — not only charged, but we would wait for the legal system to complete its process, particularly in any case on a first case,” Goodell said Wednesday. “That is something that is very important to us.”

The NFL reserves the ability, through the Personal Conduct Policy, to discipline a player even if he isn’t found guilty in a court of law.

In domestic violence cases, women sometimes refuse to press charges or testify against their abuser. Yet that doesn’t mean that the incident didn’t take place. Janay Palmer married Ray Rice the day after his indictment in the assault case. In looking into these cases, the NFL may have to make some difficult judgment calls.

In the letter to owners, Goodell said the NFL expects it has higher standards:

“Much of the criticism stemmed from a fundamental recognition that the NFL is a leader, that we do stand for important values, and that we can project those values in ways that have a positive impact beyond professional football. We embrace this role and the responsibility that comes with it.”

Yes, it may be tricky, but the NFL isn’t going to back away from the issue anymore. Goodell won’t make the mistake of interviewing an alleged victim in the room with the alleged assailant and his coach and general manager again, as happened in the Rice case. News conferences featuring couples in crisis? Unlikely after Goodell’s listening tour on the issue.

For Porter, seeing the discussions and meeting come to fruition in such a comprehensive way was deeply gratifying.

“When I saw that policy, I was astounded,” Porter said. “I didn’t expect the response to be that big. Having done this work for 20 years, it was like my partner said — the needle moved.”

Like this:

Ways an abuser isolates his victim.

1. Shuts down the phone. He doesn´t trust the people she is calling or those who are calling her so he´ll cut the line or disconnect the house phone and may confiscate or break her cell phone so nobody can contact her.

2. Controls Internet access. He doesn´t want her to connect with her friends or family using email, Facebook, Twitter, or chat, so he turns off the computer or controls Internet access. If she is allowed to be online, he may control and monitor her activity. He may demand that she give him her passwords and otherwise monitor what websites she has visited. He may post inappropriate photos or messages to her accounts to get friends and family to “unfriend” or block her accounts.

3. Controls the money. He may not want her to work. If she does work, he will still control the money. Having her be totally financially dependent on him gives him the power to manipulate and control her. She can’t make purchases, go where she wants, or even access medical care without asking his permission and approval. The bank account, debit cards, etc. are only in his name.

4. Keeps car keys. He may make sure there is only one car, and he will control the keys.

5. Raises barriers between her and family and friends. He will find excuses for turning down invitations from her family and friends. He doesn’t want to attend her family events. He doesn’t allow her to call or visit her parents as often as she would like. He manipulates, causes or exacerbates tensions or problems between family members, resulting in cold and distant relationships between them.

An abusive man uses isolation as the number one tool in order to make her believe that she is alone, that nobody loves her and nobody is going to help her. When she feels helpless, the more power he has over her.

These things are not true. Her family and friends DO CARE about her. HELP IS AVAILABLE.